This I Believe

More often than not I would say that I enjoy living life on the edge. I believe that in today’s messed up world any moment could be your last; so I really like doing things that many other people would probably be less than willing to try. My dream is to sky dive. I want to experience that moment of absolute freedom from everything but gravity, that moment when, for those two minutes of freefall, there’s nothing on your mind but “OH MY GOD!” I want to know what it’s like to be trembling from having so much adrenaline rushing through your system.

But it wasn’t always like that for me. A while back I remember being one of those kids that was always afraid of basically everything. My family has always vacationed with my cousins in Michigan right on the lake. I used to dread these trips because it meant tubing on my uncle’s boat, which scared me to tears. I should mention that my uncle is the king of skipping humans, which means that when he throws you off the tube you literally skip across the surface of the water once or twice before being slammed into the lake. After seeing many of my family members succumb to this fate, I could do nothing more but cry and squeeze the life out of my mother’s leg, begging her to protect my 45 pound frame from this terrible fate.

That was pretty much how my early summers went. But, one year when I was seven all the adults except my uncle went out for the day leaving my brothers and cousins in the care of my uncle. He decided we’d go boating, promising me I wouldn’t have to go tubing if I didn’t want. He lied. As soon as we were out he threw me into the tube and gunned it. I remember thinking that if I held on long enough with my death like grip that the boat would run out of gas and I wouldn’t be thrown off. This was a lost dream however, because my uncle pulled his secret move where he slows down just enough to lull you into a false sense of security then pulls a sharp turn into a slingshot like motion that, considering I only weighed 45 pounds at the time, this move threw the tube into the air. The mere thought of this ten minutes earlier would have made me cry but strangely enough I found myself laughing. Then I hit the water and did what’s known as a “face-skip” where I flew off the tube into a flip and skipped on the surface once on my face before being slammed into the water. When I swam back to the boat, my face and neck should have hurt, but I just felt this amazing elation like I was floating and seeing my uncle and cousins crying from laughter at my pain, all I could say was, “I wanna go again”.

From that point on I’ve searched for more exciting things to do to give me that same feeling. The feeling that can cover up any pain and make you rise above any fear. The feeling that is caused by nature’s most natural drug. I believe that it’s the best feeling on the planet. I believe in adrenaline.

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This week’s essay

Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, lawyer Djenita Pasic enjoyed the peace of her religiously diverse country. But after the fall of communism and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, Pasic was forced to reevaluate her ideas about religion and tolerance. Click here to read her essay.